Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Sparkfun AVC 2011: It's Official!

With shaking fingers, I registered on my smartphone in the middle of the airport, minutes after the announcement was posted... making me almost certainly the first person to sign up :)

The clock is ticking. Just 3 months to finish a robot car that can navigate around a building fraught with GPS-obscuring urban canyons and car-destroying stealth curbs... while also dodging obstacles along the way.

That's right. the on-land robotics folks (like yours truly) have some new challenges in the form of barrels added to the path. There's also a new time bonus of -30 seconds for driving through a 3' arch placed somewhere along the path.

EDIT (1/19/11): Did I miss something? Why yes I did... simultaneous starts in the land category. Five robots run each heat at the same a time. Translation: moving, unpredicatble obstacles! Whee!

All this sounds hard. Maybe I should build a robot plane instead?

In related news, all the major components for the robot are now in my lab ready to be interfaced.

Moments before I left for the airport, my most recent Sparkfun order arrived, containing a GPS module, sonar range finder, serial LCD, and a couple other fun things.

I've been blessed with good fortune lately. Thanks, Sparkfun, for putting on Free Day, wherein I was able to answer enough questions to subsidize the purchase of some of the above.